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 the end of his Amicitia (ed. Sarina Nathan, Rome, 1909, p. 87), we find him writing: "The Italian people neither can nor ought to live under tribute, for liberty chose her chief seat in Italy. But, although it is Italy from the strait of Messina and Brindisi unto Aquileia and Susa, there are nevertheless boundaries which liberty in modern times hath not been wont to cross: Rome, Perugia, Faenza, and Treviso for the laws of liberty extend to the bed of the swift-flowing Tagliamento. Assuredly the admirable realm of Venice, which is one of the chiefest members of Italy, preserves the Italian liberty in the highest degree." This testimony of a Tuscan—writing about 1205—to the italianità of Venice is noteworthy, and the whole tone of the passage shows that when Italians, in the age of the Communes, spoke of Italia, they did not mean the restricted regnum italicum of the Langobards and Franks.

4. V.E. I. 10, 11, 15, 16, 18; Epist. V. 2, 5, 6; Epist. VI. 2; Epist. VIII. 10, 11; Inf. I. 106-111, IX. 112-114. XX. 61-69; Purg. VI. 88-105, VII. 94-96; Par. VIII. 61-72, XXX. 133-138; Mon. I. 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14; Conv. IV. 4. Cf. T. Casini, Dante e la patria italiana, in his Scritti danteschi (Città di Castello, 1913); P. Villari, Dante e l'Italia (Florence, 1914); E. G. Parodi, in Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, N.S. XXIII. (Florence, 1916), pp. 107-108; and, especially, F. Ercole, L'unità politica della nazione italiana e l'Impero nel pensiero di Dante, in Archivio Storico Italiano, LXXV. (Florence, 1917).

The letter to the Princes and Peoples clearly implies a kingdom of Italy with the Emperor as national king. Ercole well emphasises the significance of the words "non solum sibi ad imperium, sed, ut liberi, ad regimen reservati" (Epist. V. 6). One of the two MSS. gives for regimen an alternative reading regnum. There is the same distinction in Inf. I. 127, where Virgil speaks of God as the Emperor who reigns on high: "In tutte parti impera e quivi regge." Dante did not conceive of this kingdom of Italy as the comparatively limited 42